updated 09:05 am EST, Fri March 7, 2008

iPlayer for iPhone active

(Updated with BBC commentary) The early indications of a beta iPlayer client for the iPhone have been confirmed. Beginning today, mobile visitors to the iPlayer website can now watch a limited number of BBC TV shows, such as Whistleblower. The video has been specially converted to cope with the limitations of Apple's Safari browser, which cannot play Flash; it is most likely then that episodes are being encoded in streaming QuickTime.

All versions of iPlayer let users watch the last seven days of BBC programming for free, as a service to those paying the TV license fee. As such it is only available within the UK, and the only client that supports downloading videos at present -- as opposed to streaming -- is the Windows version. A Mac client is in the works for sometime this year though, and it may be joined by an Apple TV version.

Update: The BBC remarks that iPhone streams use 400Kbps H.264 video, with a 116Kbps AAC soundtrack. Because of this, the iPhone can only access content through Wi-Fi, as EDGE access will always be too slow.

All very interesting...

... but about as useful as a chocolate teapot. It seems that they are deploying a version that needs to be streamed. That means WiFi. Now, when I have a good WiFi signal AND I am somewhere I would be watching a hour's worth of TV, I'll be at home. I'm not going to sit under a lamp-post with a Cloud router on it, or go down the pub (that's for drinking with mates) to watch TV.

And if I'm at home, then I have a much better device for watching iPlayer. It's called a 17" MacBook Pro. Even better than that I have a 32" TV with Virgin Media Replay TV.

So I'm genuinely interested to know who will be using this, and where. Any suggestions?

What we need is an iTunes version where we can subscribe, download and then take with us on the iPhone/iPod when we are on the train, tube, bus, etc. That'll be a Podcast!